‘An Invitation for Me to Think’ Shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association’s National Translation Award
October 09, 2014

NYRB is pleased to announce that Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think, edited and translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, additional translation by Matvei Yankelevich, is one of five books shortlisted for this year’s National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).

The judges’ announcement is as follows:

“Vvedensky is a marvel: a poet too little known in Russia, and not known at all in the English-speaking world, is revealed as a major 20th-century world poet—wonderful, wonderfully strange, and haunting. The alchemical translation, with its shifty rhymes and non-rhymes, intense images and absent logic, knits and unknits reality before the reader’s eyes, walking not a line so much as a live wire.”

On Wednesday, December 7, at 7:30pm, Paul Giamatti will present an evening of short fiction from NYRB Classics at Symphony Space's Selected Shorts. Performers will include Jane Kaczmarek (Malcolm in the Middle), Billy Porter (Kinky Boots),...